0 commentsThe music tells us what kind of movie Side Effects is going to be. It coils beneath what seems like a realistic plot and whispers that something haunted and possessed is going on. Imagine music for...

0 commentsby Richard RoeperAs much as I enjoy The Walking Dead on AMC and movies such as 28 Days Later, one of my ongoing complaints about the explosion of the zombie genre is the general mopery and overall...

0 commentsBy Richard Roeper
Since 1999 I've been carrying a blue pill in my pocket, holding onto it for the moment when I'd truly need it. The pill, I was told, would instantly erase the memory of any movie...

0 commentsby Richard Roeper
Very few horror movies would last past the second act if the characters in these films were actually fans of horror movies.
Sometime after the first occurrence of Scary Old-Timey...

0 comments"Old age ain't no place for sissies," Bette Davis is said to have said, and the longer age lasts, the less of a sissy you can be. The opening shot of Amour, Michael Haneke's new film, shows...

0 commentsOsama bin Laden is dead, which everybody knows, and the principal facts leading up to that are also well-known. The decision to market "Zero Dark Thirty as a thriller therefore takes a certain...

0 commentsThe tsunami that devastated the Pacific Basin in the winter of 2004 remains one of the worst natural disasters in history, and although I assumed its climax as shown in Clint Eastwood's film ...

0 commentsWith the 2013 Oscarcast moved up to February 24, movie fans are already in a lather over the possible nominees, especially since again this year there can be "up to" 10 finalists in the best picture...

0 commentsIn another time and another place, Starlet could have inspired a short story by Chekhov or O. Henry — a story about two women, one 22, the other 85, who are linked by one of those accidental plot...

0 commentsJosh Radnor's Liberal Arts is an almost unreasonable pleasure about a jaded New Yorker who returns to his alma mater in Ohio and finds that his heart would like to stay there. It's the kind of film...

2 commentsAnna Karenina and Madame Bovary are two of the most notorious fallen women in literature. Karenina is prepared to lose all the advantages of high society in favor of the man she loves. Bovary...

1 commentsAng Lee's "Life of Pi" is a miraculous achievement of storytelling and a landmark of visual mastery. Inspired by a worldwide best-seller that many readers must have assumed was unfilmable, it is a...

3 commentsI've rarely been more aware than during Steven Spielberg's Lincoln that Abraham Lincoln was a plain-spoken, practical, down-to-earth man from the farmlands of Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. He had...

0 comments"Farewell, My Queen" begins early in the day of July 14, 1789, at the royal palace of Versailles. It was not yet a date fraught with destiny. In the rat-swarming servants' quarters, a young woman...

0 commentsEven as I was watching Cloud Atlas the first time, I knew I would need to see it again. Now that I've seen it the second time, I know I'd like to see it a third time — but I no longer believe...

0 commentsAll of my previous selves still survive somewhere inside of me, and my previous adolescent would have loved The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The movie has received glowing reviews, and some snarky...

0 commentsIn 1984, Tim Burton launched his career with a live-action short named Frankenweenie, and now he returns to that material for the new Frankenweenie, a stop-motion, black-and-white animated comedy...

0 commentsWe tend to identify with the leading character of a film, even if he is a heartless bastard. Few films illustrate this curiosity better than Nicholas Jarecki's Arbitrage, and few actors might have...

0 commentsPaul Thomas Anderson's "The Master" is fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air. It has rich material and isn't clear what it thinks about it. It has two...

0 comments"Celeste and Jesse Forever" is a good-hearted romantic comedy about a likable couple — so likable, indeed, that it swims upstream against the current of our desires. The two have been happily...

1 commentsLawless is a well-made film about ignorant and violent people. Like Killer Joe of four weeks ago, I can only admire the craftsmanship and acting, and regret its failure to rise above them. Its...

0 commentsWith an off-the-shelf title like "Hit and Run," I had worked up less than a white-hot enthusiasm to see this movie, but it's a lot more fun than the title suggests. How many chase comedies have you...

0 commentsThe Odd Life of Timothy Green is a warm and lovely fantasy, the kind of full-bodied family film that is being pushed aside in favor of franchises and slam-bang confusion. On a picture-postcard farm...

0 commentsThe magical event that happens in the life of a young novelist named Calvin Weir-Fields is a dream come true for him, but it becomes a nightmare. Calvin (Paul Dano) had the misfortune to write, in...

0 commentsCut off from the mainland, surrounded by rising waters, the Bathtub is a desolate wilderness of poverty where a small community struggles to survive. Hushpuppy considers it "the prettiest place on...

0 commentsThe Dark Knight Rises leaves the fanciful early days of the superhero genre far behind and moves into a doom-shrouded, apocalyptic future that seems uncomfortably close to today's headlines. As urban...